An octopus-bioinspired solution to movement and manipulation for soft robots

TLDR

Soft robotics promises advances in locomotion and manipulation in unstructured environments, yet creating soft robots that can exert effective forces remains difficult; biological inspiration has begun to address this gap. The study investigates how Octopus vulgaris uses the same limbs for crawling and for grasping and manipulation. An ad hoc silicone arm with embedded cables that emulate octopus arm muscles was designed and built according to a biological hypothesis of crawling. The resulting arm performed pushing‑based locomotion and object grasping, validating the biological observations and showing a simple, controllable soft robot capable of diverse tasks.

Abstract

Soft robotics is a challenging and promising branch of robotics. It can drive significant improvements across various fields of traditional robotics, and contribute solutions to basic problems such as locomotion and manipulation in unstructured environments. A challenging task for soft robotics is to build and control soft robots able to exert effective forces. In recent years, biology has inspired several solutions to such complex problems. This study aims at investigating the smart solution that the Octopus vulgaris adopts to perform a crawling movement, with the same limbs used for grasping and manipulation. An ad hoc robot was designed and built taking as a reference a biological hypothesis on crawling. A silicone arm with cables embedded to replicate the functionality of the arm muscles of the octopus was built. This novel arm is capable of pushing-based locomotion and object grasping, mimicking the movements that octopuses adopt when crawling. The results support the biological observations and clearly show a suitable way to build a more complex soft robot that, with minimum control, can perform diverse tasks.